Flower Power

Crystal bouquets to me are so elegant and so in keeping with my tiffany, crystal theme. I first heard about them from this message board at favorideas.com. Another Tiffany bride mentioned that she had used one for herself and real flowers for her ladies. I had never even heard of crystal bouquets. So what did I do next? I googled it of course and all kinds of things popped up including the price. As usual everything that says wedding has to be priced sky high. They started at $450 per bouquet. Are you kidding me? Then I saw this wonderful post from one of the knotties over at The KnotShe gave detailed instructions on how to make them and there were lots of wonderful photos of the finished product by other knotties. For some reason I can't find the link that took me there but .Project Wedding had a similar one. The task seemed a little daunting but i'm a DIYer damn it.

I have since finished all 5 bouquets using crystal and silver beads and ribbon from Micheals. It was a relatively simple process but very time consuming and tedious. Boy my fingers hurt from pinching that wire. Ok so i'm getting ahead of myself. Here is one of my babies. This one is for my bridesmaid.



The pictures don't do it any justice at all.It's not dolled up with the ribbon yet. I'm using silver wired ribbon to wrap around the stem and then let some flow down past the stems.

I love, love,love my bouquets. Believe it or not, this bouquet is made up of 500 stems with 500 beads. 400 crytsal and 100 silver. A pack of 550 cost $3.99, I bought 4 and a pack of 400 silver cost $2.99, I bought 1 and used 40% off coupons so it was a steal. $450 my aunt Fanny and that was just the starting point. I also bought a pack of aqua beads from a craft store in North Carolina when I went there for a week in August 2008. (I pick things up everywhere I go, always on the prowl). I wanted to make mine a bit different from that of my ladies so I made them aqua and crystal instead of silver. I also made it bigger - 600 crystal and 140 aqua beads. They were the perfect shade. Shiny, shiny, shiny. Boy oh boy how they sparkle. I can only imagine the brilliance of all five sparkling in the sunshine at our outdoor wedding. ohhh, I can hardly wait!